Monthly Archives: February 2008

Finally We Are United in Video

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Blu-ray stands victorious on the Battlefield of Formattedness with sword raised and head high while it’s cohorts do little jigs on the sidelines. HD DVD lies dead at it’s feet, the Format Wars finally over. And in his manor on a hill overlooking the the field of battle, DVD heaves a tired sigh of relief, his fears of a world divided once again on how their video should be properly delivered, put to rest at last. Now at last he is at peace. 

The company [Toshiba], which began sales of HD DVD in March 2006 with the HD-A1 player, "decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence," said chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida. The Blu-ray format is now the definitive winner in the war and stands unopposed as the optical media replacement for DVD.

It’s official: Toshiba announces HD DVD surrender | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

Anybody remember the days of the first format wars? VHS vs Betamax? I certainly do and a war that wasn’t officially put to rest until the last Betamax machine was pushed off the assembly line in 2002. Realistically speaking though DVD reunited the world of video under one format but even today VHS still reigns supreme of plastic encased reel to reel video. So I shuddered violently and had viscous flashbacks of ancient format wars gone by as I watched HD DVD and Blu-ray have at-ing one another on the field of battle with the "big rollers" making odds and choosing  sides along the perimeter. A world video-divided yet again? Could it possibly stand the strain of yet another round of video format incompatibility and, as an end result, having "Life-As-We-Know-It" suddenly crumbling in a fit of extreme exasperation? Looks like we’ll never have to find out.

We plan on upgrading when our 26 year old, RCA Colotrak 2000 Video Monitor (cost: $1000 in 1981) finally decides to blow up. At the rate it’s going we figure that particular event will occur sometime around 2012 .

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Being a WordPress 2.5 Bubble Head.

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I decided to take the day and use it for fiddling around with WordPress 2.5 a bit. I’ve had the nightly builds installed in my local Sandbox for a while now but I wanted to see how it performed online so I threw up a test install of WordPress and updated it to the latest nightly build. Okay…the package is definitely bigger in size that’s for sure. The latest WP 2.5 build weighing in around 12 MB as compared to around 3 MB for the current 2.3.3 version. That’s hefty to say the least but it certainly didn’t show once 2.5 "bleeding" was up and running. There’s a significant overall speed increase especially when banging around the admin. Once I get a few posts put up on the test site then I’ll be able to better judge the speed of the front end as well as the back end. Can’t do much with "Hello World" now can I?

Put a new build of anything in front of me and watch me lose my mind. It’s pitiful I tell ya’, just pitiful. Good thing I have this blog to yap about it.

Firefox 3′s Places-Drag and Drop Fixed in Nightly Builds

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Drag and drop in Firefox 3′s "Places" Library (the old "Organize Bookmarks") now works properly at last or at least in today’s nightly build it does. Everyday for the last week or so the first thing I’ve done after the update to the nightly build installs itself is to head to the "Library" ("Show all bookmarks") to see if I could successfully rearrange things by dragging different items around and dropping them into various folders. Alas, to no avail until this AM when the folder I hovered over with my victim of choice in hand or mouse as the case may be and lo…came the treasured "highlight" that surrounded said folder in a blue glow and as I let my mouse button go the item disappeared into yon folder thusly!

Places Drag and Drop

Praise be to all them hard working developers!

I’m guessing that you’ll see this fix incorporated in the beta 4 release due sometime near the end of the month. Now if only they can fix the problem with badly coded sites loaded with flash and huge images causing Firefox 3 to suffer a nervous breakdown we’ll be all set.

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JT Evening News-7th Edition

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After a rather long absence, once again we are here with yet another edition of the JT Evening News (published whenever I feel like it) covering what kind of nonsense I’ve been up to with the site. So without further ado…

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MyBlogLog Gets a New Widget and so do I

and a new widget code to go with it. You can see what the end results look like by checking it out in my sidebar. For those of you using the original MyBlogLog plugin in your custom WordPress install ("mybloglog_wp_2"–available from your MyBlogLog account page under "Get Widgets") all you have to do is head to your account page at MyBlogLog and get the new widget code and replace the old code in the MyBlogLog widget located your WP admin’s widget page. You can even choose from 7 different colors.

Hmmm, looks okay to me. I kinda’ like the fly-out feature when you hover over somebody’s picture even though some work could be done with the rather nasty looking text in the fly-out window. Perhaps it’s still a work in progress–like myself.

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Best Day Ever 2008 (and 2007 and 2006)

My best day ever this year as far as visitors go is a whopping 391 unique’s and they all came on Groundhog Day and 95% of ‘em hit last year’s Groundhog Day post and most of those came just to download Phil’s photo. In fact that’s the best day I’ve had since this I first launched this blog and it was all due to a fat, furry (alright…rather cute looking) rodent. Guess I can’t complain much since my bounce rate has gone down by about 20% since then. Blessings come in strange forms indeed don’t they?

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I Hate Spam!

On the other hand my daily spam intake has tripled since then so I went off and installed the updated version of plugin again. It immediately blocked from accessing my blog of course and also blocked my host’s cron jobs as well just like it did last time. It also has "wordpress" listed in it’s blacklist file as malicious software for some reason and WordPress trackbacks were being blocked. So I trundled off to my FTP client and stuck my IP address into Bad Behavior’s white list file which fixed Windows Live Writer as well as my host’s IP for the cron jobs, removed "wordpress" from the black list file and all was well after that…I think. Either way the amount of spam caught in Aksimet’s net went from somewhere between 300 and 400 a day to around 60. Bad Behavior does work really well once you get it fiddled around properly. Now if I only could learn enough code to work up a Bad Behavior log reader and table purging type plugin that worked right from the admin it would be perfect. Maybe even an enhanced options page that included the white and black list entries so you could deal with them there instead. I won’t ask Michael (see first link) about it though, he has enough work to do.

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No Resolution for 800 X 600

My apologizes to those visitors still using 800 X 600 resolution on their displays. You’ll most likely have to scroll down to the bottom of screen to see my sidebar because that’s where it’ll be. I knew I would have to do it sooner or later and it finally came down to choosing between having to utilize a too small content area and a skinny sidebar or eliminating proper site rendering for the lowest resolution and widening things out to a more presentable and readable size. Guess which choice won out? Of course the easiest solution to the problem is to upgrade your monitor to the next larger size (and ease the strain on your eyesight as well) or you can just assume I’m using a single column theme with a really looong footer. :P

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And that’s all she wrote for another edition of the JT Evening News and as always, thank you for dropping by.

Deaf Mom Turned Away by Steak ‘n Shake Follow Up

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Karen Putz For those of you that are wondering how the situation is going with , make sure you take a look at her follow up post above that brings things up to date. I recommend also reading and subsequent since she takes a more in depth look at what this could mean for Steak and Shake and other fast food style restaurants.

This is a perfect example of how the power of the Internet and the Blogosphere can do a whole lot of good in preventing a company from "burying" incidents like this with the general public none the wiser for it. It also shows how we as blogger’s can push change for the better in any given avenue if we come together as blogging folks did for Karen.

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Another Snow Storm. Think We’ve had Enough?

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Backyard before the next storm

What you don’t see in the above photo is that the paths around the snow mound are the top of a solid base about a foot thick  packed down by previous freezing rain and ice storms that came in between the many regular snow storms we’ve had so far this winter. It even held the weight of the snow blower and myself that made those paths (the mound is for my [almost] grandson to play in).

You can get a good idea what kind of snows we’ve had since the first one that came in November from the next photo of our poor shed that houses the lawn mowers, lawn chairs and table, yard tools and other implements of destruction. You also might notice how well we’ve kept the top of that shed free from snow so it doesn’t collapse from the weight like other much larger, much more expensive sheds have that I know of. Think all that snow will melt by late June?

Shed in snow 02-12-08

Another 6-12 inches is coming tonight. Hellooo snow blower. Now if only I can find a place to put it. We’re running out of room!

‘Mozilla: For the Record’-A New Mozilla Blog

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Mozilla, whose I site I’ve always thought as being somewhat difficult to navigate around and finding information tailored toward the average user and other interested parties, has decided to start a portal of said information in the form of a new blog called . In the opening post by , the Director of Community Development at Mozilla, he describe’s the site’s intent:

For the Record is a Mozilla community program for discovering, cataloging, and responding to what’s being said about Mozilla online.

We also want to make it easier for people to talk/report/blog about Mozilla by providing a collection of answers to frequently asked questions and responses to common misconceptions or mistakes.

As we go forward, this program will also help develop spokespeople who will be able to deliver the Mozilla story more effectively and in more places.

Apparently one of the main reasons for this new blog about Mozilla and how things work there stems from the plethora of articles and posts written about the upcoming release of Firefox 3, some accurate, some not so accurate (my latest post about Firefox 3 beta 3 was one of the links in the second post at the site but whether I’m considered one of the more accurate ones or not remains to be seen).

In the second post called , the title of which reflects Mozilla’s commendable policy of releasing milestones of their popular software such as Firefox only "when it’s ready" and not before, Asa asked Mike Beltzner, the head developer behind Firefox 3, to explain the philosophy behind how Mozilla actually runs it’s release schedule and adjustments thereof for purposes of getting the best quality possible into any given release:

The first and most important thing to state is that we, as a project, are quality driven, not date driven. We use dates to set targets for milestones, and we strive to put out the best milestones possible, but due to the changing nature of the web, we always judge each milestone against our basic criteria of quality, performance and usability. The other factor how we rely on community use and testing of our betas to help us judge their quality. Without our close-to-million strong beta audience, we couldn’t get the usage and testing data required to provide us with the confidence to move into a shippable product.

In the context of adding a fourth beta, the decision was between holding beta 3 for some new work being done on performance, usability, and memory use, versus shipping the beta sooner to get testing on the improvements (based on community feedback) from the past month and a half. We decided that the best thing for our beta audience would be to release beta 3 and add another milestone as opposed to holding for the late-braking improvement opportunities. Those will be the basis for our fourth beta.

We all want to ship the best browser possible on the fastest timescale, and we meet weekly to evaluate our current product against the potential improvements we could continue to make. When our quality, usability and performance are solid enough to be called Firefox 3 (as judged by everyone involved in making it) we’ll ship it.

So there you have it. Finally a place to go where one might find accurate and detailed info on how the minds at Mozilla work, pose any questions one might have and find out what’s happening with the software they’re working on so we, the blogger’s of the world, can spread the word far and wide and the word might just have a truer ring to it from now on. Not a bad idea at all if you ask me.

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Firefox 3 beta 3 Release Features

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firefox Firefox 3 beta 3 should hit the streets within the next couple of days and there’s a detailed, in depth look at what you can expect from at . Again, I highly recommend this release to those that don’t mind using beta software. From using the trunk builds, now in the beta 4 (pre) stage, I can attest that beta 3 is going to be pretty impressive.

I’m betting (hoping is more like it) that the final release will be sometime in March and that’s still too long a wait for me to install this as my browser of choice. Firefox 2, my steady Internet companion since November of 2006 will be well succeeded indeed.

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